7 Steps in Creating a Marketing Plan.

We have often come across the fancy word in Business i.e, Marketing Plan and Advertisement, and most of the people consider it the same. But why people consider it the same, is it same in Business. In this blog, I will lay out some interesting facts about the Advertisement and Marketing plan.

By the end of this blog, you will be able to differentiate between two of the term. You can learn about the steps in creating a marketing plan from scratch. For more detail, you can read Philip Kotler’s marketing book. Philip Kotler is also known as the father of marketing. You can see it here:- Click Here

Marketing as the name suggests is something about studying markets. But do you know what Market’s are?

Markets are the place where the seller sells goods to the buyer in exchange for money. So Markets, in it is the place where the transaction between buyer and seller takes place. Note:- it is not necessary that the place should be physical. If a person is buying a good from an online platform then he is in the virtual market.

To understand how the market works is the first job for any marketer to make a marketing plan. A Marketing Manager first analyses different- different markets and find out their needs in a particular segment. For example:- Uber finds that people are busy and they get irritated when public transports are not available on time. So to resolve this problem Uber build an app that focuses on making the trip easy for a traveller.

Step 1:- Finding Burning problem.

Here Uber first analyse the burning problem of people i.e, availability of public transport.
Marketing Manager’s first job is to find out the burning problem of the market.

Then comes the second step.

Step 2: Product developement.

Then Marketing manager suggests the team how the product should work in order to solve the problem of the market. For example, you have a problem with excess electricity consumption for your refrigerator, so a Marketer firstly catches your problem then suggest the team to build a product that consumes less electricity.

Step 3: Supply chain

After building the right product for the market, a marketing manager then plans the distribution channel for the product, that how the product will reach to a different location and how people can buy the product easily. Which distribution channel will lead to minimum cost. For example:- to make smartphone cheaper nowadays smartphones companies are selling their phones on an online platform.

Step 4: Product Pricing

What should be the right price for the product, at which price the product can be accessible to all? What is the market rate? All these kind of questions are answered by the Marketing Manager.

Step 5: Promotion

Now comes the most awaiting step that is promotion. Now at the time of launching of the product, the company has to communicate the message that how its product will solve the problem of people. To communicate the message company take help of promotion techniques.

Some promotion techniques are:-

1. Personal Selling
2. Public relation
3. Advertising
4. Sales Promotion
5. Digital marketing

a) Personal Selling

Here a person goes door to door to sell their product and aware the people about the product. This is the most effective techniques of promotion as a sales guy personally explains about the particular product. But along with it. It is the most expensive technique as the company has to pay for every visit and coverage per person is very high. For example:- You have been come across by a survey man or women at your door.

b) Public Relation

Every Company needs to have a good PR team so that a company can manage to maintain its public image in the society. And when a company successfully build its image in the society then its product sells automatically.

c) Advertising

Most awaited topic for this blog. Advertisement means only to convey your message to your target audience through non-personal communication. For example- Akshay Kumar promoting a product through T.V commercial. Here Akshay Kumar does not go door to door to sell products instead he endorses his image on the product and convey the message about the product to people.

See, Advertisement is only the small part of Marketing. Marketing is more that advertisement.

d) Sales Promotion

When a company announces offers and coupon to boost the instant sale for a product. For example- Diwali dhamaka offer, Wednesday sale etc.

e) Digital marketing

Promoting a product on Digital Platform through various medium like Search Engine, Social Media, Forums, Website etc is known as Digital marketing.

Step 6:- Feedback

The most important step of all is the constant improvement of the product by taking customer feedback. Feedback is taken by companies through various method like- free and paid surveys, online polls, door to door survey etc.

Step 7: Back to step 1

Marketing is not just one hit go technique, one needs to work on it continuously,. After taking customer feedback, the company needs to go back to step 1 and improvise the product according to customer demand and then bring a new improved product in the market. By doing this a company can improve its product to such extent that it will become difficult for other competitors to compete. For example:- Google Search engine has nearly no competition in his field of search engine.

You can also read about inbound marketing :- https://myknowledgeclub.com/what-is-inbound-marketing/